‘I Am McLovin!’: 15 Trivia Tidbits About ‘Superbad’
Part bromance, part coming-of-age story and part drawing and talking dongs all the time, Superbad is as much about teen anxiety and friendship as it is about who’ll get to bang who in the end. Written by comedy super team Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg back when they themselves were first discovering things like wet dreams, the film has inspired a long line of teen sex comedies that show boys and girls being equally horny and experiencing the consequences thereof. It was both Christopher Mintz-Plasse and Emma Stone’s feature film debuts, and it was the first movie to ever use the term “fingerfuck.”
Read on about the making of the one where Rogen sports the most ridiculous-looking goatee in the history of teen cinema...
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The Opening Dance Scene Was Originally Filmed for the DVD Menu
Goldberg came up with the idea of recording Michael Cera dancing for an hour and then adding it to the DVD Menu to screw with viewers “so the people would be like, ‘Oh, how long does this go on for?’ They would wait for it to loop, and it never would,” Cera explained. “Then they recorded Jonah dancing because they liked it and decided to use it at the beginning of the movie, which I love.”
Jonah Hill Didn’t Want Christopher Mintz-Plasse in the Movie
Apparently, the actor who played Fogell — or, as everyone knows him, McLovin — irritated Hill during his audition. “I didn’t know until maybe two weeks ago that after my audition Jonah was like, ‘I don’t want that guy,’” Mintz-Plasse told Collider. Cera added: “Literally, right when you left the room, everyone was laughing at Chris, and Jonah was like, no. And we were like, ‘No, seriously. That’s why it’s funny.’ Actually, that day, we went and watched the tape. After we had auditioned, we went to Seth’s house, and we all sat around and watched the tape, and Jonah already saw it. He was hardly amused, though.”
You can watch the whole thing go down at the 7:34 mark below.
Bill Hader Accompanied Emma Stone and Her Mom to the Movie’s Premiere
“It was Emma’s first time seeing herself in a movie; it was very sweet,” Hader remembers. “We sat in the back of this theater in Westwood, and it blew the roof off the place. People were going crazy, and we were just like, ‘Whoa.’”
The Actor Who Played Young Seth Originally Auditioned for ‘The Office’
Casey Margolis shared over on TikTok how his audition for The Office led to him getting the part of young Seth, the boy who just can’t stop drawing dick doodles. Famed casting director Allison Jones (who also cast Apatow’s Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared) remembered Margolis and ended up calling him to read for Superbad. Margolis said he “was scared shitless” during his audition with Rogen but that he at least made the room laugh.
@caseymargolis_
A Younger Jason Segel As Evans?
Apatow said on the movie’s DVD commentary that he first read the script while shooting Undeclared and that he did a table read with Rogen and Jason Segel as the two lead characters, with Martin Starr reading Fogell. The actors, however, were too old for the parts by the time Superbad went into production. Rogen and Starr both ended up playing older characters in the movie.
Not a Lot of Improv Made it Into the Movie
While doing a Pineapple Express panel at the 2008 Comic-Con, Apatow said that for Superbad, they stuck to the script more than they thought. “Jonah Hill was very proud of how much he thought he improvised his part, and part of awards season, we had to transcribe the movie and decide what script we would send out to people, and we realized that very little of the movie was improvised,” the director said. Apatow added that Hill did get to improvise a lot while shooting, but Rogen chimed in saying that “we just didn’t use it. I read interviews where Jonah takes credit for improvising stuff that was in the script. ‘When I improved that, I don’t know where it came from…’ We wrote that 14 years ago!”
Jay Baruchel Got Michael Cera His Audition
Rogen explained on the DVD commentary that he and Baruchel were working on Fanboys, “and I said, ‘I think you might like Superbad,’ and literally the first thing he said is, ‘You gotta have Michael Cera come in. He’s fucking amazing, that guy.’ I was like, ‘Who the fuck is that?’” Cera’s mother also had a hand in it, as she convinced her son to do the movie where he gets to say, “Yeah, chicks go nuts for that... the male camel toe.”
Christopher Mintz-Plasse Got an Audition Through a Myspace Casting Call
Casting director Allison Jones created a Myspace profile and asked kids to send her headshots and videos of themselves. Mintz-Plasse was one of 4,000 kids who responded.
It Was Dave Franco’s First Feature Appearance, Too
The younger brother of James Franco got to make his feature film debut in Superbad, playing a high school jock who gets told off by Rogen for once wetting himself. “I got the part in Superbad while I was still in college,” Franco told The Daily Beast. “At the time, I’d done an episode of 7th Heaven. I remember reading that script, and although I was green at the time and had no idea what the hell I was doing, I could recognize it was a great script. I auditioned for the role of the bully that spits on Jonah at the beginning of the movie, but I guess the kid who pisses his pants seemed like the more fitting role for me.”
Only Booze Behind the Camera
Both Mintz-Plasse and Cera said that whenever their characters were drinking, it was either apple juice, water or non-alcoholic beer.
Rogen’s Dad Has a Cameo in the Movie
Mark Rogen plays the bat-wielding angry “Father with Bat,” who attacks Hill with a baseball bat. Hill, of course, plays Rogen’s character Seth, so we’re just going to believe that this was autobiographical.
Rogen and Goldberg Wrote ‘Superbad’ After Watching a Shitty Movie on Television
The two Canadian friends were 13 years old when a crappy movie on television sparked their interest in writing, well, a better one. “It was some dog-shit movie, and we were just like, ‘We could fucking write a better fucking movie than this,’” Goldberg has said. “And 30 minutes later, we were pretty bored and said, ‘We should write a better movie than this.’ So we went upstairs to my parents’ desk area and just started writing a script.”
Clark Duke Auditioned for Fogell
Clark Duke, the Clark half of the Clark and Michael web series with Cera, auditioned for the part of McLovin. While he obviously didn’t get it, he did end up in the movie as an extra in the party scene.
Apatow Helped Rogen and Goldberg Write a Better Ending
“We used to end the movie after the party, with them just walking away,” Goldberg explained. “And Judd was like, you didn’t follow through on the emotional story. So that slowly came out. We composed the sleeping bag sequence and the shopping mall sequence, and those were key. They were the finish on that story.”
Just, All the F-Bombs
“We had 187 Fs,” Cera once said. “Scarface had 182.”
